The first sustained study of the vibrant links between domestic craft and British colonialism In the eighteenth century, women’s contributions to empire took fewer official forms than those collected in state archives. Their traces were recorded in material ways, through the ink they applied to paper or the artifacts they created with muslin, silk threads, feathers, and shells. Handiwork, such as sewing, knitting, embroidery, and other crafts, formed a familiar presence in the lives and learning of girls and women across social classes, and it was deeply connected to colonialism. Chloe Wigston Smith follows the material and visual images of the Atlantic world that found their way into the hands of women and girls in Britain and early America—in the objects they made, the books they held, the stories they read—and in doing so adjusted and altered the form and content of print and material culture. A range of artifacts made by women, including makers of color, brought the global into conversation with domestic crafts and consequently placed images of empire and colonialism within arm’s reach. Together, fiction and handicrafts offer new evidence of women’s material contributions to the home’s place within the global eighteenth century, revealing the rich and complex connections between the global and the domestic.

The history of men's needlework has long been considered a taboo subject. This is the first book ever published to document and critically interrogate a range of needlework made by men. It reveals that since medieval times men have threaded their own needles, stitched and knitted, woven lace, handmade clothes, as well as other kinds of textiles, and generally delighted in the pleasures and possibilities offered by all sorts of needlework. Only since the dawn of the modern age, in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, did needlework become closely aligned with new ideologies of the feminine. Since then men's needlework has been read not just as feminising but as queer. In this groundbreaking study Joseph McBrinn argues that needlework by male artists as well as anonymous tailors, sailors, soldiers, convalescents, paupers, prisoners, hobbyists and a multitude of other men and boys deserves to be looked at again. Drawing on a wealth of examples of men's needlework, as well as visual representations of the male needleworker, in museum collections, from artist's papers and archives, in forgotten magazines and specialist publications, popular novels and children's literature, and even in the history of photography, film and television, he surveys and analyses many of the instances in which “needlemen” have contested, resisted and subverted the constrictive ideals of modern masculinity. This audacious, original, carefully researched and often amusing study, demonstrates the significance of needlework by men in understanding their feelings, agency, identity and history.

Focusing on everyday life in nineteenth-century Britain and its imperial possessions”from preparing tea to cleaning the kitchen, from packing for imperial adventures to arranging home décor”the essays in this collection share a common focus on materiality, the nitty-gritty elements that helped give shape and meaning to British self-definition during the period. Each essay demonstrates how preoccupations with common household goods and habits fueled contemporary debates about cultural institutions ranging from personal matters of marriage and family to more overtly political issues of empire building. While existing scholarship on material culture in the nineteenth century has centered on artifacts in museums and galleries, this collection brings together disparate fields”history of design, landscape history, childhood studies, and feminist and postcolonial literary studies”to focus on ordinary objects and practices, with specific attention to how Britons of all classes established the tenets of domesticity as central to individual happiness, national security, and imperial hegemony.

Needlework, Affect and Social Transformation offers an original framework for moving beyond binary discourses that class practices of needlework as either feminist or reactionary. Using transnational, contemporary case studies – such as the Social Justice Sewing Academy, fictionalised Bangladeshi garment workers as well as the famous Pussyhat Project – Katja May suggests a new approach to the interpretation of textile crafts as an affective social practice, and draws on under-represented issues of race. May connects her study to broader material and social conditions of inequality, allowing for a nuanced and sensitive understanding of the role of needlework in feminist political activism. This broader look at how textile crafts function in the realms of politics and activism conceptualizes quilting, dressmaking, embroidery and knitting as routine activities invested with emotions and entangled with material and social conditions as well as political potential.

Domestic handicraft was an extraordinarily popular leisure activity in Victorian Britain, especially amongst middle-class women. Craftswomen pasted shells onto boxes, stitched fish scales onto silk, scorched patterns into wood, cast flower petals out of wax, and made needlework portraits of the royal spaniels. Yet despite its ubiquity, little has been written about this curious hobby. Providing a much-needed history of this under-studied phenomenon, Talia Schaffer demonstrates the importance of domestic handicraft in Victorian literature and culture.Novel Craft presents what Schaffer terms the "craft paradigm" -- a set of beliefs about representation, production, consumption, value, and beauty that were crucial to mid-Victorian thought. She uncovers how handicrafts expressed anxieties about modernity and offered an alternative to the conventional financial, political, and aesthetic ideas of the era. Novel Craft reveals how this mindset evolves in four major Victorian novels: Gaskell's Cranford, Yonge's The Daisy Chain, Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, and Oliphant's Phoebe Junior. Each chapter centers on a scene of craft production that expresses the novel's ideals and also interrogates the novel itself as a form of craft, and each chapter highlights an influential craft genre: paper crafts, pressed flowers, knitting, and hair jewelry. The book closes with a coda on the current resurgent crafts movement of Etsy.com as a fresh version of a Victorian sensibility.Featuring illustrations from two centuries of domestic handicraft, Schaffer deftly combines cultural history and literary analyses to create a revealing portrait of a neglected part of nineteenth-century life and highlights its continuing relevance in today's world of Martha Stewart, women's magazine crafts, and a rapidly expanding alt craft culture.